GIGABYTE Z68XP-UD3-iSSD Motherboard Review

GIGABYTE Z68XP-UD3-iSSD System Power Consumption

Since power consumption is a big deal these days, we ran some simple power consumption tests on our test beds. The systems ran with identical power supplies, Solid-Sate Drives, Memory kits and motherboards from the same company. To measure idle usage, we ran the system at idle for one hour on the desktop with no screen saver and took the measurement. For load measurements, Prime95’s in-place large FFT’s were run on all cores to make sure each and every processor was at 100% load for maximum power consumption and heat. Curious about other test scenarios, we decided to 3DMark Vantage the performance preset and took the maximum power consumption during the first GPU test.

Benchmark Results: The GIGABYTE Z68XP-UD3-iSSD had the lowest CPU power consumption that we have seen so far in our Intel Z68 system. The GIGABYTE Z68X-UD7-B3 was pulling 161 Watts at the wall while the Z68XP-UD3-iSSD was pulling only 139 Watts, thats 22 Watts less. The idle and 3DMark 11 power consumption was also lower than our other Z68 systems. The Z68XP-UD3-iSSD pulled only 88 Watts at idle while the Z68X-UD7-B3 pulled 95 Watts and the ASUS P8Z68-V Pro pulled 91 Watts.